---------------------------------- By Steve Rensberry rensberrypublishing.com
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(RPC) - 10/31/10 - Judging by the latest estimates, the Glenn Beck "Restoring Honor" rally in August was dwarfed in size by the crowd that converged on Washington D.C. on October 30 for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear."
Attendance was estimated at between 200,000 and 250,000, compared to roughly 85,000 for the Beck rally.
If you were looking for succinct, you got succinct. If you were looking for humor, you got humor. If you were looking for inspiration and some straight talk for fear mongers and those in need of anger management classes, well, even a tea party supporter might come away with something -- or not.
"We live now in hard times, not end times," Steward said in the final speech of the rally.
His advice for the media in general: "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing."
An estimated 1,150 regional "Restoring Sanity" rallies were held in close to 85 countries, according to a report from Christian Science Staff Writer Stephen Kurczy, "Jon Stewart's 'Rally to Restore Sanity' energizes expats from Paris to Prague."
At a blog post on www.huffingtonpost.com/, Arianna Huffington is cited for comments she made during an October 31 appearance on the CNN broadcast "Reliable Sources," in which she disagrees with host Howard Kurtz's reference to Stewart as a liberal.
"What makes him and Colbert special is the fact that they use satire to speak truth to power, whether that power is liberal, conservative, in the media, in politics," Huffington said.
Neither was he all that unfair in his criticism of the media, she said.
"The message at the end is incredibly important -- what we in the media tend to cover, whether it's Balloon Boy, or Reverend Jones burning the Quran -- at the expense of other things that are happening around the country, where we put our magnifying glass, as he put it, is incredible important," Huffington said.
Entertainers at the rally included Cat Stevens, the O'Jays, Tony Bennett, Sheryl Crow, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kid Rock, Sam Waterston, John Legend, The Roots, and others.
For further reading: http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/